It Also Travels Through Time
by PencilGuardian
Summary: He opens the door for her, and in the space of a minute, the world has undergone some kind of bizarre shift. So many questions, but just one answer, and even that seems given reluctantly: "It travels through time."
1. Chapter 1

She steps out of the cave and into the sunlight, discreetly blowing half a day's worth of grit and dust from her nostrils. Europe. Archaeology. Neanderthals! An opportunity of a lifetime. Well worth the thousands of dollars of tuition, and the hundreds more accrued so far in living expenses, she tells herself. Right now, though, she finds herself struggling to believe it. Rocks and bones could yield a lot of information to those trained to find it, but today especially, it is what they aren't saying that preoccupies her thoughts. The intangibles, she calls them: culture, art, language and consciousness. Things that science cannot test, cannot prove.

She cranes her neck to loosen stiff muscles, and pauses to look back into the yawning recess, lit, for now, entirely by the slanting afternoon sunlight. She counts five human bodies scattered amongst the buckets and light poles, five _Homo_ _sapiens_ crouched and sprawled in their thin, dusty summer wear, clutching tiny trowels and clumsy clipboards as they slowly scrape the accumulated blanket of years from the heads and limbs of at least two other hominids of the variety _Homo_ _neanderthalensis_. Or should it be _Homo sapiens neanderthalensis_? Ape and man, or man, all? They would not settle such a question here and now, and probably not ever. At least, not in this way.

They could explain how a Neanderthal hand would have crafted a projectile point, but no one would ever know what the Neanderthal mind thought about it, whether those hands crafted out of mere instinct, or also for art. So much of the natural world was recycled by erosion and time: plants, skins, wood, hair. So much so quickly reclaimed by the planet, leaving only the basest of bone and stone traces behind to hint at what had once been. What _might _have been. Man, or beast? Or some uneasy straddle of the two?

She strolls down the hill towards the water pump, carrying the empty water cooler and wonders why these things trouble her the way they do. Is it a function of being a social animal, and afraid of being alone in the world? Or is it simply that her mind still thrives best on absolutes? Regardless, it is bedeviling curiosity, which this superficial work of dirt removal is only exacerbating. She squints up at the vast, clear sky and the nascent philosopher in her wonders if it isn't a good thing, though, to have a few unanswered questions, a few mysteries to challenge the comfortable, old rules?

"You're all wrong, of course. Poor little humans, bravely facing the darkness with nothing but your little bit of science. It's charming. No, inspirational! But you're still wrong."

The man's voice is idiosyncratic, his words, mid-conversational and seemingly out of context. She stops. She knows that neither he, nor the dark blue portaloo he leans against, were there a moment ago. But from the look on his face, she'd swear he'd just been reading her mind. So she cocks an eyebrow and asks, "How do you know that?"

"Because I was here to see it. Or, rather, I will be," he answers, and her first impulse is to assume he is being sarcastic. And strange.

But she feels accomodating and tells him, considering the last time the cave was inhabited by anyone other than Cro Magnons was over 30,000 years ago, that he looks good for his age.

He appears smug, and perhaps mildly offended when he lets her know that he isn't a day older than 900. She laughs at the lie. So does he. "Would you like to see for yourself?" he asks, opening the door to the portaloo.

She doesn't understand what he means (and has he just invited her inside a portable toilet?). But from out of the door spills a strange, green-gold illumination, and she perceives a bit of contradictory vastness inside. Enough to keep her from retreating back to the cave from this loony. Enough to make her set down the cooler and peer in (and then wonder which of them is the loony, really?).

How is it possible? Did he build it, or find it? Is it even of this world? What's it for?

So many questions, but just one answer, and even that seems given reluctantly: "It travels through time."

And though she is standing in it, engulfed by this gloriously impossible thing, she scoffs. A time machine? After all, the existence of one random impossibility does not imply the existence of any other random impossibility, no more than flipping a coin once has any effect on the second toss.

"Fifteen minutes," he declares ominously, "and you'll have more proof than your little mind will know what to do with."

She takes it as a challenge. It's bait she can't refuse, and from his expression, it's clear he knows it, too.


	2. Chapter 2

He opens the door for her, and in the space of a minute, the world has undergone some kind of bizarre shift. It is the same cave, she recognizes it. The sky is clear and bright, full of the same afternoon sun, and she sees people scattered around the hill, working. But where are the portaloos? The trucks? _The road? _The people stop working and stare, and she can do nothing but stare back at them and notice what minor details the illustrators and sculptors got wrong. When the largest of them approaches, she thinks of a charging gorilla (despite the upright gait and hairy, but all-too-human skin of his chest and arms), and withdraws into the doorway, clinging to it. She watches in fascination as the creature--who stands barely taller than herself--greets the man who brought her here, slapping his arms and gibbering in deep-throated tones no human could make. _Impossible_.

Slowly, the other creatures begin to approach, and slowly, she realizes she is not in danger. They cluster, jabbering excitedly, around her, around the portaloo, so close that she smells them, the smell of people, the smell of animals. They reach towards her, touching her clothes, her bare arms,which resemble denuded twigs next to theirs. Their large faces fill her with an instinctive _wrongness. _She has seen their like before, but they did not move, emote, or speak. Seeing those images live, feeling their hands, warm and real, upon her person, changes everything.

She cannot understand the sounds they make, but it is remarkable how easily she reads the language of their movements and expressions. So like people. Her shock subsides, her sense of wonder is overwhelming. They are curious about her clothes, her hair, the field pack she has slung over her shoulder. And she...she must know if this is real. She lets them draw her towards the cave, where the elderly and young children lounge around the low fire.

The cave is much bigger inside than it seemed before (as it would be if stripped of 30,000 years of deposition). She smells roasting meat and catches whiffs of blood and waste and moist dirt that crystallize in her mind. They seat her on a high stone ledge, begin rearranging the skins and the food. A pair of old women sit near the back of the cave and, striking long pieces of flint together in a rhythm, they begin to moan. No, to sing! She listens, her world shrinks to that one tiny revelation. Distantly, she hears the man who brought her here speak to her, mention something about an errand; he'll be back shortly, he says. She nods to quiet him. (Yes, whatever! _They sing!_)

She shows them her field pack, her water bottle and her matchbook, and they show her their hand axes, oiled bladders and sewn skins. They offer her roast and roots, and she shares a couple of chocolate bars she had forgotten about in the depths of her bag. She admires the colorful streaks of pigment that adorn their clothes and skin, and then they find her polaroid camera.

It is difficult to make them understand its use, at first. They watch, bemused, as she pulls out the glossy print and waves it vigorously, and do not seem impressed by the ghostly image of rocks and trees. So she points to another old woman, seated at the cave entrance, chewing on a hide to soften it, and takes a picture. Now they are impressed, and they crowd her in eagerness to get their own pictures taken. There is incredulity at seeing themselves as they really are, and laughing amusement when friends respond to their own pictures with similar skepticism.

Eventually the camera runs out of exposures, and in the lull that follows, the women take out pigments and paint each other's faces. Some decide to make her a special project, and it is impossible to sit still and not giggle when three or four fingers are gently poking and stroking her face. She regrets not bringing another roll of film with her, especially when she goes climbing the outside of the cave with several youth, and sitting high over the cave mouth, sees a smattering of large, dark shapes on the undulating plains. She pulls out her field glasses and her jaw drops. Mammoths.

The evening sunlight reddens, and over the crackling of the fire, as the youth try to teach her their words, there comes a strange, rasping sound. The blue box is back, and it is time for her to go. (Time. _Time!_) Before she leaves, she makes gifts of her matchbook and remaining chocolate bars, and accepts a small packet of jerky in return, "for her long journey home." She keeps a couple of the photographs, including the one of the old woman, for herself, but is happy to leave the rest in their hands. It is surreal to think it, but the glossy prints will no doubt lose their novelty, get damaged and eventually either find their way into the campfire or crumble to nothingness long before the technology that made them will even be thought about by modern men.

Once back inside the craft, her host shows her a little side room with a mirror and a water basin with which to cleanse the art off her face. She asks her--pilot?--about his errand. He responds vaguely about living plastic and protein planets ten years from now, and it makes as little sense to her as the workings of her camera must have to the tribe; as little sense as anything else about him and his bigger-on-the-inside fake portaloo do, but what can she do about it? So she laughs at him, at all of it, dizzy with euphoria.

Minutes later, he reopens the main door, and she steps out into mid-afternoon sun once more. Battered trucks rest, their beds loaded with gear, where the hunters had sat, shaping their tools. There are women, but they are not the stout, sturdy mothers, clad in utilitarian leather, poking at the ground with digging sticks; instead they are clad in stained cotton t-shirts, and they sift dirt through wooden screens with slender, sun-tanned arms.

She checks her cell phone, and finds it only fifteen minutes later than when she left, yet her wristwatch--as well as her body--insists the gap is more like three hours. She looks back at the man, amazed. He lounges in his doorway and smiles knowingly, and a chill races through her nerves. He asks her if she had fun. She has no words with which to answer. "Well, must be off. Things to do, you know," he says. He steps back into the box and waves cheerfully. She has so many questions, but cannot put voice to any of them. So she waves goodbye. The box fades away as if it were never there in the first place, and the wind blows her hair across her face.


	3. Chapter 3

She remembers to refill the water cooler only because she happens to trip on it on her way back to the cave. It is a different place, its floor a seemingly nonsensical, escher-esque staircase of squared-off levels, draped with extension cords and scattered with metal tools, light poles and buckets. It echoes with chitchat, with human voices of a higher, stranger timbre, more akin to children than adults. But the hearth remains, a dark, round hole, and she gets her bearings. A man kneels over it, holding a small trowel instead of a fire stick. She sees a smear of soot on his jaw and she rubs her own cheek self-consciously. There is still black pigment beneath her fingernails, and she wonders if any of it remains in the cave, yet to be found. (_Art!_)

She finds her spot along the back wall, where her colleague crouches over the remains imbedded in the floor. She stares at the delicate array of toe bones she had been exposing. Not bones; a person's foot. The thought is inescapable. Were you there? Did I just meet you today? Except it hadn't been today; it was 30,000 years ago, on another summer day that happened to be very much like this one.

"Wow, look at the wear on these teeth! Not a young one, for sure," her colleague remarks, and she thinks about the old woman she photographed not three hours--fifteen minutes--ago. This could be her, someone she'd shared chocolate with, who might have made the jerky now nestled in the bottom of her backpack, still fresh, maybe only a day old, while the hands that made it are mostly crumbled to dust from thousands of years of weather, from basic, universal entropy. From time. Simple time. Three hours, fifteen minutes, _lifetimes._

She can't do it. She sits on hands and knees, stares at the bones, and feels weak. Her colleague asks if something is wrong. A migraine, from out of the blue, she answers, and it is only a partial lie. She needs to get out of here. When she goes to the field director, he agrees she doesn't look well and finds someone to drive her back to the hotel.

In her room, she feels better, anchored to the now. She dumps her pack on the floor, and starts to empty it. She sees numerous sooty fingerprints on it, the ghostly mark of an extinct people. She feels an almost panicky fluttering in her stomach, and it doesn't begin to go away until she puts both the photographs and the bundle of jerky into the fireplace and sets them alight with a Bic she finds in her nightstand drawer. (After all, she left her matches back in the cave.)

She sits on her balcony, tries to read, tries to listen to the radio. The hours repeat themselves as they did on that--_this?_--other day, and the embers finally die into ash. She wonders who the man really was (is, will be?), and why he invited her. (_But, a time machine? Could it have been anything else?_) Despite the evidence that is dirtying her backpack and vanishing up the flue, she goes back over her memories and wonders if it really happened at all.

She hears the trucks pull up to the hotel, hears the slamming doors, the muted chatter of the field crew, and wonders if she'll even be able to go back to the cave tomorrow, or indeed, ever again. She doesn't know what she'd tell the field director. Financial crisis? Nervous breakdown?

The air is growing cold in the purple evening, so she leaves the balcony, closes the door and goes to her bathroom. She looses her hair from its braid and runs her fingers through it, trying to make sense of it all. Her watch is still running three hours fast, and she fixes it. The battery was getting old. (_Thirty thousand years and counting?_) She bows over the sink and her hair falls around her face. It smells of woodsmoke, and when she closes her eyes, she feels herself drifting back, untethered to the centuries. She hears the excited chatter of the tribal youth, the crackle of the fire settling, and distantly, she even thinks she hears the voice of that old woman in the back of the cave, singing.

She snaps her head back up and opens her eyes, staring at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She looks tired. She brushes her hair back and the smoky smell vanishes, and when she walks back into the main room, she discovers that the voices and crackling were only the radio. She turns on a light and cautiously, she picks up her backpack. In the incandescent light of the lamp, the sooty marks are nothing but indistinct smudges.


End file.
